A few days ago US magazine Game Informer revealed some new details on Modern Warfare 2. Sergeant John "Soap" MacTavish is back as an NPC leading Task Force 141 through snowy mountain terrain on the tail of a Russian terrorist group looking to build on the international chaos caused by Zakhaev and his naughty nuclear bomb detonation in the first Modern Warfare title.

Jason West, president and CTO of Infinity Ward, is quoted as saying, "The gameplay is wide open and has a lot of variety." It was also mentioned that there will be no co-op campaign. West said, "We did a lot of co-op stuff early on that we were interested in [...] it didn't work with the story mode at all." However, a report on CVG suggests that there will be a Special Forces mode with a series of co-op missions. The CVG piece also suggests that player characters will now be able to scale walls and drive vehicles.

And yesterday, the US online gaming hive mind discovered that Treyarch is definitely working on Call of Duty 7 - well as definite as a staff member's LinkedIn update can indicate. Yes, according to 1up and others, Treyarch senior animator David Kim shows Call of Duty 7 listed in his experience on the professional social networking site.

Of course, it's not much of a surprise, like MPs with a second home, the two developers tend to flip this brand between them, alternating dev duties. Rumour has it, Treyarch is planning a Vietnam-based title for its latest CoD romp. 'Nam? Again? Couldn't it at least have been, say, Korea?

So anyway, back to Modern Warfare 2 - an open world? What do you think? The previous title was a great example of linear level design working in tandem with a controlled narrative. The only problem was the infinite re-spawning of enemies, and there are hints that Infinity Ward is looking into this. Can sandbox environments improve the recipe?